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Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Come On In 
by Loren Rhoads 

The beat picked up just as Meg felt the mushrooms beginning to creep
up on her. The shadowy figures of the dancers around her seemed just a
shiver darker than they had before. The strobes overhead burned a
little brighter. She told herself the tremulous sensation in her torso
was just excitement as the psilocybin kicked in and not nausea.
Mushrooms are natural, she reminded herself. Clean. Not made in a lab.
She was going to be fine.

The music crashed in over the drums, assaultively loud. Meg felt as if
her eardrums flexed with each new wave of sound. She ducked her head,
trying to find a position where the speaker wasn’t projecting directly
at her.

Chris put his cheek against hers and shouted directly into her ear:
“Did you forget how to dance?”

His breath smelled like the garlic pizza they’d had before coming to
the warehouse. Meg’s stomach twisted and she swallowed hard. “I need
to drink,” she shouted back at him.

He grabbed her hand and hauled her through the other dancers back
toward the black light over the bar. What did she want to drink, she
wondered. Nothing sounded good. She wasn’t really sure she wanted to
put anything into her mouth, let alone try to swallow. Her stomach
cramped and fidgeted.

“Beer?” Chris shouted at her.

“Water,” Meg decided. As Chris acquired the drinks, she watched the
dancers throb to the music. They didn’t appear to be enjoying
themselves as they grimly flailed and bounced beneath the spinning
lights.

Did she want to stay? Did she want to go? Did she want to deal with
getting her coat from the check and waiting outside in the cold for an
Uber? Wouldn’t it be better to just stay here, like they planned, and
leave at dawn to get breakfast before going home to crash?

Chris nudged her with a water bottle. She unscrewed its cap and
sipped. She could practically feel the moisture soaking into the
tissues inside her mouth. She felt like a sponge that had been wrung
dry. She sipped some more, swished it around in her mouth, swallowed
cautiously. It felt good.

Meg offered the water to Chris, but he raised a beer bottle as a
toast, swung it against her plastic bottle. She fumbled the bottle,
dropped it. It went spinning out of sight into the darkness beneath
everybody’s feet. “I’m cutting you off,” Chris teased, but he held the
beer out to her all the same. “Be careful,” he cautioned when she took
it.

Before long, the beer was gone and Chris was pulling her back out to
the dancefloor. Meg felt better now. The drug had settled in her head,
not her body. She loved the way light streamed from the gel lights
overhead. It felt good to dance, like she could feel the music
sloshing around her skin, but in a comfortable way, like being in a
hot tub and paddling your arms back and forth under the water. She
felt herself smiling. It seemed like a long time since she had been so
happy.

Across the dancefloor, one by one, then in a wave, people cracked the
glowsticks that hung on lanyards around their necks. It looked like
fireflies flickering on across the room. Meg realized that the
overhead lights had gone off, although the music hadn’t decreased in
volume. The only light now came from the fluorescent chemicals glowing
on everyone’s chests, pulsing to the rhythm.

“This is when it gets good,” Chris promised. He lifted his pale blue
glowstick to the crown of his head. He drew a line from his scalp,
down the center of his nose, under his chin, down his throat. Then he
let the glowstick drop onto its lanyard, reached up, and wrenched his
skin apart. He peeled his face in two halves, goggling at her with
parboiled eyes.

Meg spun and staggered into the couple behind her. “Hey!” one of the
women protested. She had peeled her skin down to her shoulders, where
it gathered like a mink stole. Her date had wriggled her skin down
around her waist.

Everyone around her was writhing and shimmying and casting off their
skin just as casually as peeling off their clothes. Meg caromed off
one person then the next, recoiling from the hot slick wetness of
their bodies. She thought she must be screaming, but she couldn’t hear
it over the music.

.

Fiction © Copyright Loren Rhoads
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Author Loren Rhoads:

Unsafe Words

In the first full-length collection of her edgy, award-winning short stories, Loren Rhoads punctures the boundaries between horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction in a maelstrom of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Ghosts, succubi, naiads, vampires, the Wild Hunt, and the worst predator in the woods stalk these pages, alongside human monsters who follow their cravings past sanity or sense. The stories are drawn from the pages of the magazines Cemetery Dance, City Slab, Instant City, and Space & Time, the Wily Writers podcast, and the books Sins of the Sirens, Demon Lovers, The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two, Tales for the Camp Fire, and more.

Available on Amazon!